Semiconductor component manufacturers are constantly striving to increase the functionality and performance of their products, while decreasing their cost of manufacture. One approach for increasing functionality and performance has been to increase the number of circuit elements manufactured from a semiconductor wafer. As those skilled in the art are aware, a semiconductor wafer is divided into a plurality of areas or regions called chips or dice. Identical circuit elements are manufactured in each chip. Increasing the number of chips in a semiconductor wafer lowers the cost of manufacturing semiconductor components. A drawback with manufacturing or integrating a large number of circuit elements in a semiconductor wafer is that it increases the area occupied by each chip and thereby decreases the number of chips that can be manufactured from a single semiconductor wafer. Manufacturing passive circuit elements from a semiconductor substrate uses a large portion of the semiconductor substrate. Integrating passive circuit elements with active circuit elements further increases the chip size because of the sizes of the passive circuit elements. Integration of active and passive circuit elements also complicates the manufacturing process flows. Thus, semiconductor chip manufacturers trade off the number and types of circuit elements that can be manufactured from a chip with the number of chips that can be obtained from a semiconductor wafer to lower manufacturing costs.
Another drawback with manufacturing a passive circuit element, an active circuit element, or monolithically integrating passive and active circuit elements in a semiconductor chip is that the circuit elements may become damaged or their performance may be degraded by the processing steps. For example, once a Metal-Insulator-Metal (“MIM”) capacitor has been manufactured, subsequent processing steps may damage the MIM capacitor.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to have circuit elements and a method for manufacturing circuit elements that protects them from subsequent processing steps. In addition, it would be advantageous for the circuit element and method for manufacturing the circuit element to be time and cost efficient.